a child, dear doctor, is not a pet
by Elizabird
Summary: He's not sure how that infernal Clara brought her ridiculous class of students on his precious TARDIS, but he wants them out. Gone. Goodbye. (Small kidfic oneshot, purely because I am fluffy trash.)


They are all, without a shadow of doubt, annoying brats. He knows this, and he's made it very clear to that infernally responsible companion that she needs to get all of the tiny humans out of his professional TARDIS at once. Time travel is no place for a class of twenty-two screaming six-year-olds, all pulling at the gravity reactors and squabbling and running through the corridors. Twice, now, he's had to stop one of the boys from falling into the inter-time-dimension void, and he's explained very carefully that unless that boy stops opening the door he'll fall out and his eyeballs will be squeezed from inside his skull.

"You're not very good with children, Doctor," says the companion. Companionably. She's rubbed the black lines off her eyes, but her lips are still that unnatural plum purple that one of the girls so favoured in the past. Martha. This one isn't called Martha, Martha was aeons and faces ago. This one is called Clara.

"Children annoy me. Children irritate me. Children are little adults in larvae form, twice as disgusting and just as smart. All that smart is compressed into a tiny ball, and a lot of smart means stupid," he says matter-of-factly. It's the truth; he's been around long enough to know that no human is truly, really smart. They're blinded by heroism or sentimentality or fear.

"Doctor!" Clara admonishes. "You can't call my class... you can't call them larvae, that might be verbal abuse. I might get reported."

"So you can get fired for calling your class maggots, but not for bringing them into a dangerous alien spaceship and letting them roam free?" He asks, interested despite himself. "Well, how does that work? What kind of corrupt rules do you teachers operate on?"

"Funnily enough, there wasn't a lot about space aliens in the rule book when it was written," Clara shoots back. He remembers why he chose her - Impossible Girl, of course, and there's nothing more tempting than the unknown, but also for her sharp wit. She is stupid, of course, all humans are. It's their default. But at times she shines with sharp, needle-point daggers, words that slip through loopholes in his own sentences and make him fumble for a comeback.

"There should have been," he says lamely. "To fill up the blank pages at the back."

"You're an idiot. Oi - Jason, get away!" She springs away from his side. Her dress is red, and spotty, and it floats around her waist like in those old films he played a few cameos in. Nice girl. Audrey. Clara, not Audrey, although she looks like Audrey, or was it Bow? Someone. She looks like her, anyway. Her legs are black. Nylon, which he helped to invent, and there's a rip on her knee which she's brushed clear liquid across. Audrey used to do that, too. She put paint on her stockings. Or was it Clara? No, this one is Clara.

He becomes aware of a pair of eyes watching him.

One of Clara - not Audrey - one of her infernal nuisances, no doubt. He turns around, ready to offer some sort of scathing comment, and stops. Raises an eyebrow - one good thing about the bushy monstrosities - and frowns.

The child is sitting on the stairs leading up to the upper layer, her knees under her chin and her hands cupping her dark cheeks. Her brown eyes are serious and measuring, staring at him in a way that other one used to. Donna used to. She used to look at him like that and then tell him to 'wise up, you silly little man' and then she would force him to take her to meet Agatha Christie. Donna looked at him how this child is looking at him and he doesn't like it one bit.

He makes eye contact, because that usually disconcerts people; this face is much more authoritative than the last one. She doesn't look away, doesn't move, although her leather-patent-clad foot shifts a little to make her hunched position more comfortable.

Deciding he's lost, he bounds over to Clara. Not Audrey. She's bending over, and her spotty dress has ink stains on it and a damp patch that might be mucus or tears, and she's ruffling the hair of a small, sniffling child. She looks tired. Humans tire easily, especially this one. She runs herself hard, doesn't she? This one does, certainly, and then blames herself for the sparing amount of hours she spends asleep to make up for the exhaustion. Humans are strange.

"What's that one called?" He hisses conspiratorially to her.

Clara raises one perfectly filled eyebrow. Why do they do that, colouring in their eyebrows? What's the point? "That one is called Sophia. Be careful with her, Doctor, her mother just passed on. Cancer. Don't say anything too tactless."

"Tactless? Never. I am tact. I am tactful." He ignores her look. Why do they all have the Look? It's a human trait, to look at him with derision and pity and annoyance and irritability and affection all at once. "Stop that. You're looking at me funny with those big eyes of yours. I don't like it."

"Tactful," she mutters, but doesn't actually give any help as to what she means.

He decides to face his problem head on and ignore Audrey-Clara Spotty Dress Ripped Nylon. His problem of the staring child, who hasn't stopped looking at him like he's an attraction at an amusements park.

"Hello," he says. Starts. That's a good start, right? That's how all of them begin conversations. Say hello, introduce yourself, talk about the weather. "Hello. I'm the Doctor. How about that sky, then?"

She blinks twice, slowly and slothlike, and then takes her hands from her cheeks. There are two red marks where she's been pressing down on her skin, which seems like another human thing that he'll never get. Sophie. Sophia? Sophia.

"Aren't you going to say anything? Humans generally do. Go on, complain about the rain. That's step four."

She pulls on the end of her braid. "Doctor Who?"

He sits down on the steps of the TARDIS, right next to her, which should have been a warning sign to himself. "I think that this is going to be a nice conversation. Which I will enjoy. I like you, small child."

"You can't just take her away!"

"You said her mother died!"

"She's six!"

Clara is facing him and she's doing the face that the other one used to do whenever he made the other other one angry. The ginger one. The - whenever he made the small man angry, or upset, the red one would go very concentrated and intense and hot, like a volcano just before eruption. Sophia is holding on to his leg. He's not sure why she finds comfort in his leg as opposed to his hands, which are opposable and more suited to holding, but he doesn't really understand anything about her right now. Or any human, really, which annoys him.

"Six, Doctor. Not twenty. Not thirty. Can you take care of a child?"

His leg is tingling from where she's holding on to it. It's not as uncomfortable as he worried it would be. It's-

"Six is old enough to decide for herself, then, if I may. Clara. You can-"

"A child is not a pet!"

"Nor do I intend to treat her like one!"

"Ahem," says the child in question, rather politely given the general attitude of her peers. "I would like to go with the Doctor until he answered my question."

To his surprise Clara knelt down and her face softened and her voice changed. "Oh? What question, honey?"

"Doctor Who?"


End file.
